skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> or, best case, in 2000 years, the entire observable universe will have been consumed for energy

You're definitely mixing things up, and the set of things may include fiction. 2000 years doesn't get you out of the thick disk region of our own galaxy at the speed of light.

> The doomers have also been funded to the tune of half a billion dollars and counting.

I've never heard such a claim. LessWrong.com has funding more like a few million: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5n2ZQcbc7r4R8mvqc

> If these Gen-X'ers and millennials really believed their kids right now were in extreme peril due to the stupidity of everyone else, they'd be using their massive warchest full of blank cheques to stockpile weapons and hire hitmen to de-map every significant person involved in building AI. After all, what would you do if you knew precisely who are in the groups of people coming to murder your child in a few years?

The political capital to ban it worldwide and enforce the ban globally with airstrikes — what Yudkowsky talked about was "bombing" in the sense of a B2, not Ted Kaczynski — is incompatible with direct action of that kind.

And that's even if such direct action worked. They're familiar with the luddites breaking looms, and look how well that worked at stopping the industrialisation of that field. Or the communist revolutions, promising a great future, actually taking over a few governments, but it didn't actually deliver the promised utopia. Even more recently, I've not heard even one person suggest that the American healthcare system might actually change as a result of that CEO getting shot recently.

But also, you have a bad sense of scale to think that "half a billion dollars" would be enough for direct attacks. Police forces get to arrest people for relatively little because "you and whose army" has an obvious answer. The 9/11 attacks may have killed a lot of people on the cheap, but most were physically in the same location, not distributed between several in different countries: USA (obviously), Switzerland (including OpenAI, Google), UK (Google, Apple, I think Stability AI), Canada (Stability AI, from their jobs page), China (including Alibaba and at least 43 others), and who knows where all the remote workers are.

Doing what you hypothesise about would require a huge, global, conspiracy — not only exceeding what Al Qaida was capable of, but significantly in excess of what's available to either the Russian or Ukrainian governments in their current war.

Also:

> After all, what would you do if you knew precisely who are in the groups of people coming to murder your child in a few years?

You presume they know. They don't, and they can't, because some of the people who will soon begin working on AI have not yet even finished their degrees.

If you take Altman's timeline of "thousands of days", plural, then some will not yet have even gotten as far as deciding which degree to study.
It's all part of a plan. The EU is very busy setting up the equivalent of the chinese "social credit". It started with "ESG" rating by banks (where you're already attributed an ESG rating depending on which companies you invest your money in) and now it's likely they'll be moving forward with computing your yearly carbon emission to then decide if you can go on vacation or not and how far.

Don't underestimate the globalists' plan to control every single individual. They have an agenda "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" (World Economic Forum plan).

Lately the EU wants to establish a registry of every single possession of every single EU citizen, down to watches, jewelry and paintings. There are literally vids with members of the european parliament asking the EU commission "guarantees" that this new registry won't be used to then confiscate these goods.

Tracking every single car is part of the plan.

And, no, I'm not seeing things.

People should vote to GTFO of the EU and should vote for much smaller goverments because the only things awaiting citizen at the end of the road is misery.

The EU is heading at full speed towards a dystopian totalitarian supra-state.
40+ JackOfManyTrades needs advice for job search
Hi peeps. Living in Germany, have a masters in chemical engineering. After working a few years in my own field, got bored and switched sectors. Then realized I really enjoy learning, getting good at a new position, and then get bored. Was young back then so I kept switching jobs, fields, industries. Have also been working as a freelancer on the side for 15+ years. Worked as a consultant, engineer, coding/language teacher (foreign languages and coding), social worker, marketing/sales agent, product/project/community manager, educator, workshop facilitator, devops technician, etc. This all used to be ok as I always somehow found a new job when I needed one. And I always found companies that didn't see this as a disadvantage. I have gained so many skills, but in the last 2 years it's been hard to find a job. My cv is pretty weird of course for typical companies and positions. I need to find people / companies who can see this as an advantage. Anyone else in a similar position? Any tips?
Who is Cody?
Call it something other than a ThinkPad... Meanwhile I'm just here trying to get my TeX Yoda II repaired after water spilled on it. Single best I/O device I have ever owned. https://tex.com.tw/products/yoda-ii

I guess I can't say I blame them though. Most people these days don't even know how a trackpoint is meant to be used effectively (i.e. by making aggressive use of mouse acceleration to rough-center the cursor in the area of the screen you want it and then fine tuning).
Moculus, VR for Rodents
> Can you provide documentation demonstrating this requirement in the United States?

PROTECT Act of 2003 - Details CSAM materials as being illegal which is enforced by FBI + ICE.

Also NCMEC which is a non-profit created by the US government that actively works in this area.
> Of course some of them are actually good, but a lot are not really.

How does the ratio of actually good to not really in the real world compare?

It seems pretty amazing that anyone, anywhere can watch a physics lecture from the multiple top professors at any time.
And people incorrectly saying Reagan had PV panels pulled down, the troglodyte. /s That solar thermal collectors never really caught on in the US shows the technology was marginal and the decision to remove them (I think when they leaked?) was arguably a good one.
Protecting yourself from Identity Theft in the USA
You said using, not possession, and after you've used it, it's no longer in your possession, externally. That distinction does not matter in New York, however, as it's not one of the places where it's illegal to posses but legal if you've just used it. (Unless it's weed.)
Diva, you can get an iPod nano on eBay…
How would you do it without storage permission? Win applications generally have dozens to hundreds of files.
> Then how was it done?

madhadron's comment answers your question. Which part are you not understanding?

> Do you disagree with the article about these issues?

What issues? What is there to disagree? The article clearly describe how it was done. There is no disagreement between the article and madhadron's comment.

> And why be dismissive?

They are not dismissive.
DNS filter is then your friend.
Twitter managed without banning alternative clients for 16 years, right up until the advent of Naughty Old Mr Car.

(They did vaguely try once, but there was such a backlash that they backed off.)
Little Snitch + DNS filter = greatness.
Which regulations mandate these "complex systems"?
Investors observed the pattern that the largest platform eats the market and bet on openAI moving along the same paths.

I disagree, that phenomenon is tied to the social network like phenomena we saw with WhatsApp and Facebook and to the aggregator business model of Amazon and Google.

Mathematically we can describe the process by which these monopolies form as nodes joining graphs:

Each node selects graphs to connect to in such a way that the probability is proportional to the number of nodes in the graph.

Sure Amazon and google feature two types of nodes, but the observation still fits:
Selling on Amazon makes sense if there are many customers, buying on Amazon makes sense if there are many offers.

OpenAIs business does not have this feature, it does not get intrinsically get more attractive by having more users.
> I don’t think people on here are ready for quite where all this goes.

Exactly.

People should vote for less government and should vote for those willing to defend freedom of speech.

Actually: we're heading towards that dystopian future because of all the government lovers and apologists.

There are only 40% of the EU citizens that don't want the EU. It's not enough.
EU countries are not required to join the Euro.

They are required to say they will at some unspecified future date, but that's another matter.
> This is also a major reason why Trump got elected: people have so little trust in the current system that they'd rather vote for somebody who promises to break it, than for somebody who promises to improve it.

I agree this is what appears to have happened but I still can’t follow the logic. What happens next? Who builds the next system and why should we expect it will be any better?
Tesla can outright decide to total/brick your car and not sell you parts. They're worse than Apple.

While an VW-owned, separately-managed Scout appear to be making a better EV, but could still take it in the direction of the corporate drones.
If little snitch worked on ios...

I'm pretty sure the only reason it works on macos at all was that it got in early. I believe Apple periodically tries to hobble it but there is pushback.
I didn't want an iPod nano, as I'm wanting to break away from the grey corporate gardens.
And of course nobody has satisfactorily solved the problem of drift (that I know of). That is to say, Trackpoints come with drift correction algorithms, but they don't always catch small drifts and sometimes they trigger when you're just making a long constant input, leading to a situation where releasing the input creates its opposite
> People simply don't want their device's default state to be "silently working against you

That was the misconception of what was happening though.

Nothing happens on your device. Only when it gets to the cloud. It just puts a flag on the picture in question to have the cloud scan it.

Which is exactly what happens before Apple suggested it and happens now. Except it does it for all your files.

> One also can't make the moral argument that the "bad content" list only included CSAM material, as that list was deliberately made opaque. It was a "just trust me bro" situation.

CSAM database is run by Interpol. What evidence do you have that they are not being honest?
The value of content creators on YouTube will follow a power law distribution. There will be a very small number of hugely profitable creators and a vast sea of people who do ok. This power law distribution makes YouTube very different to setting up a physical retail store in London. Even if I do well with my shop, I won't outperform my neighbour 1000x.

If anything Mr Beast is an argument for not using YouTube. Alphabet is incentivised to keep him happy so that he doesn't move to X. I'm sure they consider his needs before they change their algorithm, at the expense of almost all other creators on YouTube.
The problem is that a lot of the H1B people being brought in to fill jobs Americans could do aren’t the top 0.1%. Far from it. No one is against bringing the top 0.1% here.
Putin. It solves the problem of Putin.
People are suckers for convenience without considering the details of how something is made, supported, or serviced, or the TCO.
Switzerland pegged the Frank against the US Dollar, until they didn’t.
Fatbobman's Swift Weekly #64 | Happy New Year 2025

- State Issue in Swift 6
- TabView Advancements
- Genmoji in Non-Rich Text
- Dissolve Effect
- Write Swift Like Apple
- Widgets, AppIntents, Siri Shortcuts and WatchKit
I recommend reading the article if you haven’t already as it mentions this is for vehicles, there isn’t a mention of photographers.
Thank you for sharing this information...
Inherent Resilience for Tomorrow's Outage Rebecca Weng Headshot
> It can be anything, but first it has to be something specific.

Spreadsheets definitely feel more like a platform. They aren't specific to what they started out on - they're very general purpose. The metaphor of "grid of numbers you can do stuff with" is extremely not-product-specific.
I would actually go so far as to say the Propeller is a good bridge into general electronics, certainly anything digital. It comes up in the context of video generation, but it can do so much more than that because of the multicore design; instead of built-in peripherals you can use a core to implement more or less what you need, certainly within an educational context where you're not as focused on peak throughput for an SPI device or something.

The problem is that the Propeller community ended up being a lot smaller than, say, the Arduino community, so learning materials aren't nearly as available outside of Parallax's publications or the forums. That said, I think that if you took a group of kids and gave them Propellers compared to a similar group with Arduinos, the Propeller group would understand a lot more about why things work the way they do.
In my experience it’s really up to technical leadership to highlight what will happen if security flaws are ignored. If more senior leadership continues to ignore these issues, then it’s a culture issue and I wouldn’t stick around.

Surely it’s all about risk mitigation; some out-of-date NPM package with a minor flaw might cause the can to be kicked, but a major flaw with demonstrable consequences should get priority.
Japanese users are migrating rapidly to Bluesky away from X.

Mainly for the extra features, apps & integrations that Bluesky offers:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/11/25/companies/b...
This seems to be more conspiracy theory than fact.
> Whoa. How is it any of your business how I live my life so long as I am not impacting you or society in any way? I'm 72 years old and I spend my time the way I want to spend my time. I don't exercise any longer. And that will almost certainly shorten how much longer I live. How is that any of your business?

Because your actions will impact society. You might get healthcare, paid for by the rest of society, which may or may not be caused by you not exercising. Or it might be caused by you exercising.

The way people raise their kids affects society, or even simply their decision to have or not have a certain number of kids impacts society. Some personal actions can collectively impact society.
What is the point of this experiment? Is it OK to propose for Ukrainians to sabotage the lives of Russian generals?

I'm trying to apply good faith, in which case I'm going to assume you're not arguing that there has never existed a set of circumstances under which such actions would be "OK". Could you explain directly what your PoV is instead? If it is that "It's OK if Ukrainians take such actions against Russian generals, but not if Tuvaluans/___ take them against oil executives", then why?
If I get a new laptop, it must have a trackpoint and the ability to disable the touchpad. If no, will not get. But what I have now is fine and probably fime for many years to come.
Trump is a negative candidate, any % win is a landslide
No. In the country i live in, 2/3 of us is in a union. So around 66% of the work force.

In the US its 10% of the whole workforce.

Now, you explain to me why that is. I will help you. It's not about democracy.

USA is such a shitty country. Also with regards to unions.
It can be a decent _heuristic_ for “I probably don’t want to hear from this person”. Like, it’s not bulletproof, but the _cost_ of a false positive is low.
I think “follows Trump” would be a not-great heuristic, for the reason you mention, but, say, ‘follows libsoftiktok’ is probably a good heuristic for filtering out arseholes.

It can also be pretty effective for stopping brigading. Back in the day, when he was still a darling of the far-right, I managed to offend Milo Yiannopolis on Twitter (turns out he twitter-searched his own name) and he siced his followers on me. It took about a day of mass blocklists (back when these kinda worked on Twitter), and individual blocking, to stem the flow of spam; a button to simply block everyone who followed Milo Yiannopolis would have been convenient, and nothing of value would have been lost.
Every user would just check that option and press yes. The reality is that most users don't ever read any message the phone gives to them, they just treat it like any other popup and press yes. Take a look at any normal person using a phone when a permission notification appears or an error appears: they won't even read it, just press any button that closes it as fast as possible.

There's good reason to not have this prompt and not give these abilities to applications. Apple's reason to oppose the DMA and Meta here might be different, though.
Unfortunately, perihelion is not a good name for the point on the orbit that is closest to the Sun, which also makes "peristice" mostly meaningless, even if much better than "solsthelion".

Peri- means "around" (like in "perimeter" or "periphery", where the Latin translation of "periphery" is "circumference", or in "periscope", which means "look around"), which does not suggest much in terms of distance. For instance, both the Earth and Neptune move "around" the Sun, but at vastly different distances.

Apohelion for the most distant point on the orbit is a better name, because apo- means "away", but it still not the best, because "away" refers to direction of movement towards exterior, and not to the distance from the center. A body can be moving away, but still be very close to the center.

The Greek prefixes meaning "close" and "distant" are "anchi-" and "tele-" (first "e" is long). Therefore much more appropriate names would have been "anchihelion" and "telehelion", for the closest and for the most distant points on the orbit. The prefixes "anchi-" and "tele-" have already been used in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" of Homer, e.g. for "close combat" (like with swords) and "distant combat" (like with arrows).

"Solstice" is a better name, because "-stice" is cognate with "stay" (and with "stand"), and it refers to the fact that during a solstice the apparent movement of the Sun on the sky has a minimum speed, it almost stays in one place. So, for the time interval when the Sun both has a minimum speed of the apparent motion on the sky and is at a minimum distance from us, a term more correct etymologically would have been "anchistice", which is still not optimal, because it combines a Greek prefix with a Latin suffix. Translating "anchi-" into Latin would result in "propistice" (approximately meaning "staying close").
The US has much higher debt than any point in history, which is climbing rapidly, and are manipulating things as much as possible.

I wouldn’t hold them up as a shining example of “good” or “we should do the same”.
I didn’t know this is existed but it sounds very handy, thanks!
Likely for its letsencrypt integration, maybe for HTTP/2 or HTTP/3
Thank you sharing your invaluable knowledge with such a precise and accurate language. It demonstrates clearly your deep understanding of the subject.
Fabrice Bellard's Ts_SMS: Short Message Compression Using LLM
Amazon built a bit of a moat too: for example I happen to know that they own a patent on the photography setup that allows them to capture consistent product photos at scale.
I don’t think Mercedes is owned by VW.. may be you thought of Audi..
UK teenager begins Dubai jail term for relationship with 17-year-old girl
This is why I don't think LLMs will lead anywhere other than the present: they are very expensive. If top LLM company in the world can't bring those costs down in a sensible amount of time, it tells you everything you need to know about the future of LLMs. Rest assured, once OpenAI goes down and it really sounds like they are way past the peak, valuations for other LLMs companies will follow. And once they can't raise funding, all of them aside from those backed by big conglomerates (see Google's Gemini and Facebook's Llama) will survive.

The long term future of LLMs sure looks like the LLMs themselves will be commodities and the real value will lie in the use of those LLMs to deliver value
They’ll grow up with it and it will seem boring in adulthood.

Millennials had it dumped in their lap like GenX and haven’t had time to build “cognitive antibodies” but I think that’s starting to happen

Elders were addicted to TV for similar reason, but as a Xennial I grew up on TV and find it fucking boring.

Teen use of drugs and alcohol, sex is way down compared to prior generations.

It’ll take time and progress can be hampered by avarice of powers that be coughVCcough

Human biology is analog not digital. It’s far more fluid than a machine; one can be a social nut but care for themselves and others because philosophy of proper social etiquette is pretentious phrenology like bullshit. It’ll evolve defenses on its own that corpo won’t be able to anticipate or ignore until it’s too late. And just not giving a fuck to begin with is an option. Not much Sam Altman, PG can do if people just don’t use these stupid things if people just evolve into nonsense discourse but keep stuff on the shelves.

IMO in the US we need to take a minute to live by Tim Leary’s mindset, drop out and get strapped and remind a couple hundred mega rich 8 billion other people don’t actually need them.

Only Watchman will ever be able to police Watchmen https://aeon.co/essays/game-theory-s-cure-for-corruption-mak...
Yes, it’s copyright infringement.

Yes, they can send a C&D to whomever is hosting the copies of their content.

Yes, they are losing some minor potential ad income.

They will likely bother if their legal department notices and thinks it rises to a level they must contend with. My guess is that it won’t.
A Love Letter to Computers
The moment the track point is gone is the moment I'll stop buying them.

Obviously, that's one sale, but I'm pretty sure we are a large'ish group. There are, after all, not many vendors offering a track point today, so it is a differentiating factor, and we a captive audience.

Between that and occasionally screwy Linux support, I wonder what their thinking is. Sever all their unique markets and compete evenly against everyone else ? Do they feel Windows offers enough to avoid bleeding sales to Apple ? And what? They feel so confident in what's left of the Thinkpad that they have no reason to fear other vendors ? Interesting. Maybe they know better, but I'd be concerned if I held their stock
Africa's largest dam generates 18% of its revenue from Bitcoin mining
I was just going to say this. It has to have a CARB sticker. No CARB sticker, no pass. Passing a smog test in most US states typically uses on-board telemetry combined with a rear-wheel dyno. Most smog shops won't touch vehicles that lack OBD2 but still require smog tests every 2 years. Also, I'm unsure if smog shops still use an external NOx/CO probe like ye olde days or rely entirely on the vehicle to be non-VW "smog mode" honest.
What is it like to be a thermostat? (1996)
> People simply did not want their devices scanning their content against some opaque uninspectable government-controlled list that might send you to jail in the case of a match.

Again I feel like many people just didn't read/understand the paper.

As it stands now all your files/videos are scanned on all major Cloud companies.

Even if you get a hit on the database the hash doesn't put you in jail. The illegal materials do and a human reviews that before making a case.